(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
2…Hermetic/Cabalist philosophy was the dominant force behind movements for reform in sixteenth-century England…literature of the period…debate over Christian Cabala and natural magic.
7…1580s and continued…1620s, when interest in plays on sorcery and witchcraft gradually declined. A.W. Ward once attributed the beginning of the trend to Giordano Bruno’s visit to Oxford in 1583……also correlates…a resurgence of pamphlet literature on alchemy and other Hermetic subjects…mathematics, applied science, and Paracelsian medicine…
84 Many…believed that magic performed by individuals could actually hasten the onset of the Messianic age. …the world would become perfect when humanity regained the knowledge and power it had lost through original sin.
85 Guillaume Postel…described…to the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, in 1560. “led by the mater mundi, who is right reason, I have proposed a method by which the Christian Republic may be preserved uninjured and undisturbed. This is to be accomplished by a universal empire, which will enable the teachings of the Christian religion, confirmed by right reason, to be set forth. In this way, Christ will be seen to restore as much as Satan has destroyed, and it will be as though Adam had never sinned.”
86…Dee’s significance in Renaissance history may…propagandist…Tudor monarchs were descendents of the legendary Arthur…Trojan Brutus…British title to newly discovered lands was justified by King Arthur’s ancient conquests.
87…magicians’ idealism about human nature has been undercut by the ruthless actions of those who seek political power…Dr. Faustus, The Alchemist…to some extent, The Tempest.
88 Bruno…by…a purified Hermetic religion which transcended the dogmatic sectarianism of both Protestantism and traditional Catholicism…reformation of human society…elimination of religious warfare. Yates…Bruno’s magical philosophy contributed to the utopian dreams of some Elizabethans…evidence in The Heroic Frenzies that Bruno hoped that Elizabeth would play a role in effecting universal reform…executed as an unrepentant heretic in Rome in 1600…
111 Bacon adopted from the occult and alchemical traditions the belief that civilization was on the eve of a renewal of knowledge…the powers with which God had originally endowed us: “For man by the fall fell at the same time form his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.”
Magic as Love and Faith: Shakespeare’s The Tempest
174 King Lear, Troilus and Cressida…early 1600s dramatize the discrepancy between the noble ideals of Renaissance philosophers and the actual world…
175…many Shakespearean plays of the first decade of the seventeenth century center upon a crisis of faith. A loss of faith in humanity…paralleled by a loss of faith in Providence…an inability to love.
In the romances Shakespeare reaffirms the faith in humanity which he permits us to question in the tragedies. The final plays are a series of experiments in developing a genre which encloses the perspective of the tragedies in a broader frame of reference, permitting us to acknowledge the consequences of human evil while simultaneously emphasizing that such consequences are not ultimate…affirm the possibility of regeneration…
179 …Prospero’s art is a multifaceted symbol which must be interpreted on several parallel levels…confirm…the belief of Ficino and his successors that human beings obtain genuine power by aligning themselves with the order of Providence.
180 …Kermode has recognized, [Prospero’s art] is “art” in the broadest sense…the civilizing power of education and moral self-discipline…theatrical art…Shakespeare correlates all of these dimensions…magic, learning, and drama as forms of art which endeavor to perfect nature.
181…occult philosophers asserted that the magus, becomes aware of the innate ideas within the Mens, the intuitive, suprarational faculty within the soul, and once this occurs, the magician possesses the power to connect, in contemplation and/or transitive magic, the things of this world with the archetypal forms that govern them. Alchemy, in particular, is an attempt to purify the fallen world by bringing earthly creatures into more perfect unity with their governing Ideas, and Shakespeare may well have been aware of the alchemical meaning of the term tempest: it is a boiling process which removes impurities form base metal and facilitates its transmutation into gold…intimate knowledge of God’s providential purposes and consequently becomes an agent of the divine Creator. Through assent to Providence the magus could than liberate himself form the control of Fortune…
186 Tempest…dramatic debate over the question of whether humanity is bestial or godlike, Caliban or Ariel; the implied answer is that we are both and that our lower faculties must be guided and disciplined by the mind and spirit.
Juno, Ceres, and Iris…The symbolic union of earth and heaven suggests…that the marriage between higher and lower faculties…can create a harmonious and properly ordered life…occult tradition…metaphor of marriage…bringing earthly creatures into more perfect conformity with their governing Ideas.
189…historians…asserted that the survivors of the ruined Carthage founded Tunis…Gonzalo is correct, despite the incredulity and cynicism of Antonio and Sebastian, and the action of The Tempest as a whole confirms that he is correct in his optimism concerning the events of the shipwreck as well.
193…Paulina…The Winter’s Tale…calls for music and restores to [Leontes] his lost queen…obviously modeled on the account of the magical animation of statues in the Hermetic Asclepius.
194 Nature is made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This an art
Which does mend nature—change it rather; but
The art itself is Nature. 4.4.88
…nature becomes fulfilled through institutions which are associated with the controlling power of our higher faculties, and the process is completed through religious ceremonies which invoke the aid of divine grace.
Epilogue
200…Dr. Faustus…calls into question the status of traditional authorities, beliefs, and institutions. The Alchemist…endeavors to contain such revolutionary energies and to reaffirm traditional authorities…in a manner which reflects Western civilization’s advancement toward genuine science…chastened version of the dream of the return of the Golden Age… The Tempest…a balanced view of the human potential for creation and destruction
201…Neoclassical movement followed in Ben Jonson’s footsteps, satirizing the occult philosophy which had contributed to the most radical currents of the Renaissance. During the Romantic period, the renewed assertion of human visionary and creative power correlated with a resurgence, in the works of Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and others, of interest in the Neoplatonists…late nineteenth …Yeats …lamented… replacement by positivism.